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Phoenix666 writes:

Turkish police arrested the online editor of the Cumhuriyet newspaper on Friday, an unidentified police official said.

Oguz Guven, the editor-in-chief of cumhuriyet.com.tr, was taken to Istanbul police headquarters, the official said on condition of anonymity due to restrictions on talking to the media.

The official said an arrest warrant was issued for Guven after the online edition published an article about the death of Mustafa Alper, the chief prosecutor of Denizli province, in southwest Turkey, who was killed in a car crash on Wednesday.

Early on Friday, Guven tweeted, "I am being taken into custody", without elaborating further.

Sigh. Poor Turkey.

Original Submission

-- OriginalOwner_ writes:

The World Socialist Web Site reports

Former Massey Energy CEO Don Blankenship was released from prison [May 10] after serving a one year sentence in connection with the April 2010 explosion at the Upper Big Branch mine in West Virginia, which killed 29 coal miners. The Upper Big Branch blast was the worst US mine disaster in 40 years.

Blankenship served the first ten months of his sentence at the Taft Correctional Institution in Southern California. The facility, which houses many white collar criminals, boasts baseball diamonds and soccer fields along with tennis and racquetball courts. Blankenship was then moved to a halfway house for a month and spent the last month prior to his official release at his home in Las Vegas.

In tweets [that] Blankenship posted after his release, the millionaire coal boss showed no remorse for the deaths of 29 miners. He complained that at Taft he had to return to his room several times a day to be counted and could not choose what to watch on TV.

[...] In 2015, Blankenship was convicted on a single misdemeanor count of violating federal safety laws at the mine in Montcoal, West Virginia. The disaster occurred when a spark from a longwall machine ignited a pocket of methane gas, which, in turn, set off a massive coal dust explosion throughout the mine.

Multiple and grave safety violations occurred at the mine when Blankenship issued an order to "run coal", flouting regulations designed to prevent explosions. In an October 2005 memo to the company's deep mine superintendents, Blankenship outlined his priorities. "If any of you have been asked by your group presidents, your supervisors, engineers, or anyone else to do anything other than run coal (i.e., build overcasts, do construction jobs, or whatever), you need to ignore them and run coal", he wrote.

[...] Four investigations of the disaster found that bits on the longwall machine were broken and worn out, causing sparking. Water nozzles meant to keep the bits cool and prevent sparks were also broken. Proper ventilation to prevent the buildup of methane gas was lacking. Explosive coal dust was allowed to accumulate throughout the mine.

Previous: Massey CEO Indicted for Acts Resulting in Coal Mine Explosion that Killed 29

Original Submission

butthurt writes:

Kotaku reports on a (pay-walled) story originally in the Wall Street Journal in which it is rumoured that a mobile version of Nintendo's video game The Legend of Zelda is in the works:

Nintendo’s beloved Zelda series is headed to smartphones, states The Wall Street Journal in an unconfirmed report.

It’s somewhat unclear if this is a port or an entirely new game like Super Mario Run. If true, that seems most likely.

According to The Wall Street Journal, sources say this is Nintendo’s latest effort to expand its mobile line-up. The Zelda smartphone app would apparently follow Animal Crossing, which WSJ reports is likely to be out in the second half of 2017. Sources say that the Zelda app’s release date, WSJ adds, could change.

Original Submission

Phoenix666 writes:

Harley-Davidson's forthcoming line of electric motorcycles will sound like jet fighters, but you might have to wait 5 years to get one.

This iconic American motorcycle company has hinted at producing an electric model over the past few years, and has shown off a prototype bike, dubbed Livewire, in 2014, but as of yet, no firm details on an electric production model have been released. However, a recent statement from Bill Davidson, the great grandson of company co-founder William Davidson, hints at an electric Harley-Davidson motorcycle coming to market within the next five years, as part of a decade-long plan that will see 100 new models from the company.

One of the unique and recognizable aspects of a Harley is the sound of that V-twin engine, which Davidson describes as sounding like "potato-potato-potato," and which may represent something of a task to re-create in an electric motorcycle. But Davidson said the company's approach to the sound and feel of the electric bike will rival the thought put into the design of its traditional motorcycles with their signature exhaust notes, and that a unique sound was created for the bikes "through various technologies."

Harley fans love the sound, so this probably won't attract the same crowd. Or will it?

Original Submission

Fnord666 writes:

MP3, the digital audio coding format, changed the way we listen to music and drove the adoption of countless new devices over the last couple of decades. And now, it's dead. The developer of the format announced this week that it has officially terminated its licensing program.

The actual ownership history of the various patent rights involved in MP3 technology is complicated and messy. But the Fraunhofer Institute has claimed the right to license certain MP3 patents to software developers who want to "distribute and/or sell decoders and/or encoders" for it. The announcement that the company will end its licensing program was accompanied by a statement that reads in part:

"Although there are more efficient audio codecs with advanced features available today, mp3 is still very popular amongst consumers. However, most state-of-the-art media services such as streaming or TV and radio broadcasting use modern ISO-MPEG codecs such as the AAC family or in the future MPEG-H. Those can deliver more features and a higher audio quality at much lower bitrates compared to mp3."

Source: Gizmodo

See also: NPR's coverage which has additional background and details.

Original Submission

butthurt writes:

Vice Noisey reports on a musician who isolates MP3 artefacts by finding the differences between an MP3 and a lossless recording, then samples them to create his own music (N.B. the examples are hosted on Soundcloud; Javascript is needed to listen to them).

These days though, in our rush to listen to all music everywhere at all times, we often sacrifice these layers by listening to the most readily available streams or downloads, which are usually relatively crappy formats like MP3, AAC, or whatever the hell Grooveshark uses, which can sometimes sound like the recording of a song being through a coke can in a garden shed.

Often, we're losing out on a significant amount of what the artist intended, because when the original analog music is converted to one of these formats, certain layers of sound are lost in the digital compression. Translation: there's a lots of bits to your favourite albums that you may have never even heard.

Exploring this, is the Ghost in the MP3 project by doctoral music student Ryan Maguire from the University of Virginia's Center for Computer Music. He investigates these lost layers of sound, what they sound like when rescued, and then tries to make new music with them. For an example in his study, he took the layers of sound lost to compression from the acapella song "Tom's Diner" by Suzanne Vega, which was also the template song used by Karlheinz Brandenburg, the pioneer of the MP3, to test whether the compression of MP3s worked. You can hear the track he made from those bits below.

Original Submission

An Anonymous Coward writes:

"Thou canst not touch the freedom of my mind," wrote the playwright John Milton in 1634.

But, nearly 400 years later, technological advances in machines that can read our thoughts mean the privacy of our brain is under threat.

Now two biomedical ethicists are calling for the creation of new human rights laws to ensure people are protected, including "the right to cognitive liberty" and "the right to mental integrity".

https://www.independent.co.uk/news/science/delete-thoughts-read-your-mind-without-your-knowledge-neurotechnology-new-human-rights-laws-a7701661.html

Scientists have already developed devices capable of telling whether people are politically right-wing or left-wing. In one experiment, researchers were able to read people's minds to tell with 70 per cent accuracy whether they planned to add or subtract two numbers.

Original Submission

butthurt writes:

National Geographic reports (javascript required to view photos) on a nodosaur fossil in Alberta. Nodosaurs were herbivorous, armoured dinosaurs which inhabited North America and Europe. This example represents a previously unknown species. Soft tissues such as its skin were preserved by what is believed to have been "rapid undersea burial." The fossil is thought to be about 110 to 112 million years old. It features "two 20-inch-long spikes jutting out of its shoulders."

According to the CBC,

The museum is in Drumheller, Alberta (nicknamed "Dinosaur Capital of the World").

Also according to the CBC, the fossil was discovered in 2011 at an oil sands mine near Fort McMurray.

Additional Coverage:

• Washington Post
• Crave Online
• The Sun
• Chicago Tribune
• New York Times
• Daily Mail

Original Submission

MrPlow writes:

Submitted via IRC for TheMightyBuzzard

On Thursday, President Donald Trump signed a long-awaited executive order on cybersecurity.

Mainly, the order requires a number of cybersecurity reviews across the various agencies of the federal government, in order to determine what must be done to strengthen federal computer systems, as well as United States' critical infrastructure.

Here are some industry reactions to the executive order Help Net Security received.

Source: https://www.helpnetsecurity.com/2017/05/12/reactions-trump-cybersecurity/

Original Submission

MrPlow writes:

Submitted via IRC for TheMightyBuzzard

Lately I've been spending some time fuzzing network-related Linux kernel interfaces with syzkaller. Besides the recently discovered vulnerability in DCCP sockets, I also found another one, this time in packet sockets. This post describes how the bug was discovered and how we can exploit it to escalate privileges.

The bug itself (CVE-2017-7308) is a signedness issue, which leads to an exploitable heap-out-of-bounds write. It can be triggered by providing specific parameters to the PACKET_RX_RING option on an AF_PACKET socket with a TPACKET_V3 ring buffer version enabled. As a result the following sanity check in the packet_set_ring() function in net/packet/af_packet.c can be bypassed, which later leads to an out-of-bounds access.

[..] The bug affects a kernel if it has AF_PACKET sockets enabled (CONFIG_PACKET=y), which is the case for many Linux kernel distributions. Exploitation requires the CAP_NET_RAW privilege to be able to create such sockets. However it's possible to do that from a user namespace if they are enabled (CONFIG_USER_NS=y) and accessible to unprivileged users.

Since packet sockets are a quite widely used kernel feature, this vulnerability affects a number of popular Linux kernel distributions including Ubuntu and Android. It should be noted, that access to AF_PACKET sockets is expressly disallowed to any untrusted code within Android, although it is available to some privileged components. Updated Ubuntu kernels are already out, Android's update is scheduled for July.

Source: https://googleprojectzero.blogspot.com/2017/05/exploiting-linux-kernel-via-packet.html

Original Submission

MrPlow writes:

Submitted via IRC for TheMightyBuzzard

Since 2008, most of Intel's chipsets have contained a tiny homunculus computer called the "Management Engine" (ME). The ME is a largely undocumented master controller for your CPU: it works with system firmware during boot and has direct access to system memory, the screen, keyboard, and network. All of the code inside the ME is secret, signed, and tightly controlled by Intel. Last week, vulnerabilities in the Active Management (AMT) module in some Management Engines have caused lots of machines with Intel CPUs to be disastrously vulnerable to remote and local attackers. While AMT can be disabled, there is presently no way to disable or limit the Management Engine in general. Intel urgently needs to provide one.

[...] EFF believes that Intel needs to provide a minimum level of transparency and user control of the Management Engines inside our computers, in order to prevent this cybersecurity disaster from recurring. Unless that happens, we are concerned that it may not be appropriate to use Intel CPUs in many kinds of critical infrastructure systems.

It's a crying shame the what the EFF says doesn't hold a whole lot of weight.

Source: The Electronic Frontier Foundation

Original Submission

Whoever writes:

The Guardian has an interesting article describing how Robert Mercer, Steve Bannon and Nigel Farage used techniques developed within the military to influence Britain's vote to exit the EU. Although it appears that the companies involved (AggregateIQ and Cambridge Analytics) are private companies, they have deep roots within the military.

The article describes Britain as a "managed democracy", with major decisions controlled by a US Billionaire.

[ n1: The article is an interesting read, including a reference to how in 2013, Google Founder Eric Schmidt's daughter Sophie suggested Cambridge Analytics get in touch with Palantir, Peter Thiel's data mining contractor for the GCHQ and many US military and intelligence agencies. Sophie currently works at Uber. According to a former employee, in 2013 Cambridge Analytics was just a "psychological warfare firm [...] before we became this dark, dystopian data company". ]

It was with AggregateIQ that Vote Leave (the official Leave campaign) chose to spend £3.9m, more than half its official £7m campaign budget. As did three other affiliated Leave campaigns: BeLeave, Veterans for Britain and the Democratic Unionist party, spending a further £757,750. “Coordination” between campaigns is prohibited under UK electoral law, unless campaign expenditure is declared, jointly. It wasn’t.

[...] The Electoral Commission has written to AggregateIQ. A source close to the investigation said that AggregateIQ responded by saying it had signed a non-disclosure agreement. And since it was outside British jurisdiction, that was the end of it. Vote Leave refers to this as the Electoral Commission giving it “a clean bill of health”.

[...] I asked David Banks, Veterans for Britain’s head of communications, why they spent the money with AggregateIQ. “I didn’t find AggegrateIQ. They found us. They rang us up and pitched us. There’s no conspiracy here. [...] Their targeting was based on a set of technologies that hadn’t reached the UK yet. A lot of it was proprietary, they’d found a way of targeting people based on behavioural insights."

Original Submission

MrPlow writes:

Submitted via IRC for TheMightyBuzzard

MapD Technologies Inc., one of a group of select companies that offer GPU-accelerated databases, today announced the open sourcing of its MapD Core database. The company is contributing the project to the open source community and placing its code on GitHub under an Apache 2 license in order to seed a new generation of data applications.

"MapD pioneered the use of graphics processing units (GPUs) to analyze multi-billion-row datasets in milliseconds, orders-of-magnitude faster than traditional CPU-based systems," the company said in a statement. "By open sourcing the MapD Core database and associated visualization libraries, MapD is making the world's fastest analytics platform available to everyone."

[...] The company also announced a free Community Edition of its software -- provided for non-commercial development and academic use...

Source: https://adtmag.com/articles/2017/05/08/mapd-gpu-database.aspx

Original Submission

takyon writes:

John Timmer at Ars Technica reports:

So, why Titan? The two closer destinations, the Moon and Mars, have atmospheres that are effectively nonexistent. That means any habitation will have to be extremely robust to hold its contents in place. Both worlds are also bathed in radiation, meaning those habitats will need to be built underground, as will any agricultural areas to feed the colonists. Any activities on the surface will have to be limited to avoid excessive radiation exposure.

Would anyone want to go to a brand-new world just to spend their lives in a cramped tunnel? Hendrix and Wohlforth suggest the answer will be "no." Titan, in contrast, offers a dense atmosphere that shields the surface from radiation and would make any structural failures problematic, rather than catastrophic. With an oxygen mask and enough warm clothing, humans could roam Titan's surface in the dim sunlight. Or, given the low gravity and dense atmosphere, they could float above it in a balloon or on personal wings.

The vast hydrocarbon seas and dunes, Hendrix and Wohlforth suggest, would allow polymers to handle many of the roles currently played by metal and wood. Drilling into Titan's crust would access a vast supply of liquid water in the moon's subsurface ocean. It's not all the comforts of home, but it's a lot more of them than you'd get on the Moon or Mars.

Original Submission

martyb writes:

[Update at 20170515_022452 UTC: Instructions for what to do on each affected version of Windows can be found at: https://www.askwoody.com/2017/how-to-make-sure-you-wont-get-hit-by-wannacrywannacrypt/ -- I've had excellent luck in the past following his advice on when and how to update Windows. Clear, hands-on instructions are a big win in my book. --martyb]

Previously: "Biggest Ransomware Attack in History" Hits Around 100 Countries, Disrupts UK's NHS.

tl;dr: If you have not already patched your Windows computer(s), you may be at risk from a new variant of the WannaCrypt ransomware worm which lacks a kill switch and was seen over the weekend. Sysadmins are preparing for a busy Monday when countless other users return to work and boot up their PC.

WannaCrypt (aka WCry), is a ransomware worm that wreaked havoc across the internet this past weekend. It disabled Windows computers at hospitals, telecoms, FedEx, and banks (among many others). Files on user's machines were encrypted and the worm demanded $300 or $600 worth of Bitcoin to decrypt (depending on how quickly you responded). Reports first surfaced Friday night and were stopped only because a researcher discovered a domain name in the code, which when registered, caused the malware to stop infecting new machines.

We're not out of the woods on this one. Not surprisingly, a variant has been seen in the wild over the weekend which has removed the domain check. Just because you may not have been hit in the initial wave of attacks does not necessarily mean you are immune.

Back in March, Microsoft released updates to Windows to patch vaguely-described vulnerabilities. Approximately one month later, a dump of purported NSA (National Security Agency) hacking tools were posted to the web. The WannaCrypt ransomware appears to be based on one of those tools. Surprisingly, the Microsoft patches blocked the vulnerability that was employed by WannaCrypt.

In a surprising move, Microsoft has just released emergency patches for out-of-mainstream-support versions of Windows (XP, 8, and Server 2003) to address this vulnerability.

Sources: Our previous coverage linked above as well as reports from the BBC Ransomware cyber-attack threat escalating - Europol, Motherboard Round Two: WannaCrypt Ransomware That Struck the Globe Is Back, and Ars Technica WCry is so mean Microsoft issues patch for 3 unsupported Windows versions.

What actions, if any, have you taken to protect your Windows machine(s) from this threat? How up-to-date are your backups? Have you tested them? If you are a sysadmin, how concerned are you about what you will be facing at work on Monday?

Original Submission